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Mark Truscott’s Writing Space

Above is my writing space. (I have received permission to include this photograph on the condition that I acknowledge that the room’s current state is in part my fault.) Life doesn’t always conform to writerly ideals. Active kids, chaos, and full-time jobs happen, and our house is pretty small.

This is our living room, where I actually write. It’s perfectly nice, but during the hours I’m off work, the only time it’s quiet enough is from four-thirty until around seven each morning. So that’s my writing time. I’ve come to like this arrangement quite a bit, and indeed I believe it’s factored into my writing. In fact, I’m prepared to say this room in the early morning hours is the implicit setting of just about every poem I’ve written since 2008. I was certainly thinking of the view through the window when I wrote “Piano” (though it was winter).

Mark Truscott is the author of three poetry books, most recently Branches.

Photos courtesy of Mark Truscott.

Cover image by Yannick Pulver on Unsplash

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The 2021 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest Results

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2021 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest!

First Place ($1000)
“Latin class” by Kieran Egan

Second Place ($500)
“Specializing in the Prehistory of Whales” by Sandra Kasturi

Third Place ($250 each)
“Surfing near Tofino” by Aaron Schneider

“Masks” by Terry Watada

Honourable Mentions
(to be published alongside our winning poems)

“On the qui vive on my QWERTY” by Anne Swannell

“If you come” by Sarah Tsiang

“When this is over” by Jennifer Mustapha

“Selling Soffio” by Cynthia Woodman

“Birthday Balloon” by Marco Melfi

“The Spirit Bugs of Algonquin Park” by Ken Victor

“Safe U Turn” by Callista Markotich

“Airing Evora’s Laundry” by Susanne Fletcher

Look for prize winners and honourable mentions in The New Quarterly’s Fall 2021 Issue 160! Thanks to the many wonderful poets who submitted. We enjoyed reading every one of your poems.

The 2021 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest Longlist

The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the longlisted submissions to the 2021 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. The longlisted writers and their essays are as follows:

“Saint Vrain”
by Tammy Armstrong

“The Pull of the River”
by Ted Bishop

“The Singing Bone”
by Sadiqa de Meijer

“Soar”
by Chyana Marie Sage

“Happiness is a Warm Gun”
by Alison Dowsett

“Erosion”
by Adrienne Gruber

“I Draw The Eyes In”
by Jasmine Gui

“On Being Minimally Bereaved”
by Amy Kaler

“Source”
by Basma Kavanagh

“Flowering”
by Austen Lee

“They Tied On Their Aprons & Tried To Put Back The Stars”
by Jeanette Lynes

“I Can Feel Him Breathing”
by Tara McGuire

“Yelling Fire”
by Alex Merrill

“That Other Place”
by Kathy Page

“Parting Gifts”
by Shirley Phillips

“A Place Called Home”
by Nedda Sarshar

“The Cry of the Poor”
by Lori Sebastianutti

“Wave Any Ward”
by Erin Soros

“Sun Flowers”
by Suzanne Stewart

“A Second Washing”
by Heather Thomson

“Hinge Wood”
by Darryl Whetter

Stay tuned for the final lineup of winning pieces!

Finding the Form with Anji Samarasekera

“Trophy” began as an assignment for a Children’s Literature class that I took in my second to last year of my MFA at the University of British Columbia. I had never written YA Fiction before and wanted to try my hand at composing a piece that would cross-genres and forms–be both adult fiction and YA and function as a short story but also the first chapter of a potential novel.

The seed of the story was a real-life situation. I was pregnant with my second child, conceived via IVF, after years of infertility. My first child, seven years old at the time, was finally going to be a big sister and in my hormonal and grateful state, I kept thinking what if? As in, what if we hadn’t gotten pregnant with our second child? Would it have destroyed our marriage? Anyone who has gone through infertility knows how stressful and heartbreaking the journey is–I feel exceptionally fortunate to have come out of it with my marriage intact—but I could very well imagine things having turned out differently.

Because I was trying to write for younger readers (in addition to adults), I wanted the main character to be a young person and that’s when I struck on the idea of an unplanned pregnancy. I always knew that if we hadn’t been able to get pregnant again, I would mourn that loss for the rest of my life. It would have been a knife in the heart to find out that what I wanted so badly had happened so easily (and so unwantedly) in the body of someone close to me. Making that someone the cherished only daughter of the infertile mother was precisely the complication that I wanted to think about through this story, but from the perspective of that young girl who feels the burden of her parents’ grief acutely.

“The way Wayne loves Harp feels true to not only their relationship but also to my relationship with my own father.”

The setting grew out of my wanting to place a character somewhere we don’t expect her to be. A bi-racial, teenaged girl is not someone we tend to associate with hunting or gun culture. But because of who Harp is and because of how much she loves Wayne, this is a space that feels entirely natural to her. I loved the idea of the two of them sharing a passion, and the tenderness between them was very much an ode to the relationship between my older daughter and her dad. Of course, my husband says that he is nothing like Wayne and that is one hundred percent correct—but the way Wayne loves Harp feels true to not only their relationship but also to my relationship with my own father.

It didn’t take many drafts to get to a “final” version of this story. I had the major elements in place after the first iteration and then subsequent re-writes were mostly dealing with sentences and excesses of language. Places where the imagery gets carried away. There was a lot of cutting because the story started out quite lengthy—over 7000 words. In the editing, I removed large swathes of backstory that would have been necessary for a novel but were distracting in a short story. I also worked with TNQ’s editor, Pamela Mulloy, on the pivotal moment, so that it captured the story’s larger themes while remaining convincing. The story became stronger as a result – at least I think so.

YA is an unfamiliar genre and so writing “Trophy” took me out of my comfort zone as a writer. On the other hand, the emotional terrain that the story covers are recurring themes in my work. I’m thrilled to be able to share “Trophy” with TNQ’s readers and who knows, it may very well become something bigger and I may become an accidental YA author after all!

Anji Samarasekera writes fiction – both short and long – from Vancouver which is on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm(Musqueam), Skwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She has been shortlisted for The Masters Review Anthology Contest and longlisted for the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award. A graduate of UBC’s Creative Writing School, she is at work on a novel set in Sri Lanka during the civil war.

Author photo by Erin Flegg, 2021.

Cover image by Sergei Akulich on Unsplash

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The 2021 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest Longlist

The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the longlisted submissions to the 2021 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest. The longlisted poets and their poems are as follows:

Frances Boyle, “Ultramarine”
Kieran Egan, “Latin class”
Susanne Fletcher, “Airing Evora’s Laundry”
Marilyn Gear Pilling, “The Day (Long Tall Sally)”
Cornelia Hoogland, “Obit for Touch” and “The Leonids follow the Perseids”
Sandra Kasturi, “Specializing in the Prehistory of Whales”
Laurie Koensgen, “The Gift” and “Rock Paper Scissors”
Charlene Kwiatkowski, “First Word”
Sneha Madhavan-Reese, “Sing Me an Indian Song”
Callista Markotich, “Safe U Turn”
Marco Melfi, “Birthday Balloon”
Jennifer Mustapha, “When this is over” and “Birth days”
Suzanne Nussey, “Lacunae”
Aaron Schneider, “Surfing near Tofino”
Anne Swannell, “On the qui vive on my QWERTY”
Sarah Tsiang, “If you come”
Susan Vernon, “The Flyer”
Ken Victor, “The Spirit Bugs of Algonquin Park” and “Dinner at L’Orée Des Bois”
Terry Watada, “Masks”
Cynthia Woodman, “Selling Soffio” and “Water Quality: Fork Lake”

Stay tuned for the final lineup of winning poems!

What is Jody Mason Reading?

I just finished reading Kaie Kellough’s collection Dominoes at the Crossroads (Véhicule, 2020), published in 2021 by Boréal as Petits Marronages. I read Kellough’s Griffin Prize-winning Magnetic Equator (McClelland & Stewart, 2019) earlier this year.

I was first drawn to Kellough’s work because of its uniqueness: much of the black diasporic writing from Quebec (where I live) is first published in French. If Dany Laferrière is known to many unilingual anglophones in Canada, writers such as Stéphane Martelly and Rodney Saint-Éloi don’t reach these same audiences. As a poet and a prose writer and a performer, Kellough draws indiscriminately from the anglophone and francophone Caribbean: there is as much Aimée Césaire as Dionne Brand in his work, as much Maryse Condé as Wilson Harris.

Much of Kellough’s prose is set in Montreal, where he has lived since 1998, or in Georgetown, Guyana, where he locates part of his ancestry. Alive with the down-at-the-heels flavour of “contrary” post-1995-referendum Montreal (78) and the “heat and compressed cacophony” of Georgetown (65), the interlinked stories of Dominoes at the Crossroads animate the connections between these two points but rupture the journey between them with detours that render the temporality of the collection magnificently non-linear.

“Kellough’s wry approach to temporality and genre is embedded in a more general cross-disciplinary practice that weaves printed texts into soundscapes.”

A key aspect of this non-linear temporality is the collection’s insistence that an occluded black past—in the form of figures such as Marie-Joseph Angélique or the fictional Hamidou Diop––will “emerge to shape the future” of Montreal (18). If, like me, you are interested in the complex but underexamined connections of global decolonization movements on the political cultures of late twentieth-century Montreal (explored in academic work by scholars such as David Austin and Sean Mills), you’ll find much to think about in Dominoes.

Paralleling Kellough’s interest in disjunctive temporality is his experimentation with genre. Some of the texts in Dominoes, for instance, are not fiction but instead borrow from the genres of science fiction (“La question ordinaire et extraordinaire,” the Afro-futurist address of an audience on the 475th anniversary of Milieu, a post-climate apocalypse Montreal in which the northern, largely immigrant, boroughs form a new centre); the personal essay (“Notes of a Hand,” Kellough’s concluding meditation on being the “amanuensis” of his enslaved ancestors); and memoir (“Smoke That Thundered,” which takes readers on a recursive journey through Kellough’s adolescent years, one that culminates in a kind of baptism in Guyana’s Potaro River).

Kellough’s wry approach to temporality and genre is embedded in a more general cross-disciplinary practice that weaves printed texts into soundscapes. Kellough’s mixed media performances, many of which include parts of the texts published in both Dominoes and Magnetic Equator, can be experienced on his website. Clearly influenced by the ideas of Paul Gilroy, the texts of Dominoes (especially “Witness,” “We Free Kings,” “Petit Marronage,” and “Navette”) forge an Afro-diasporic sensibility that draws on the syncopated texts of “reggae riddim,” soca, Nigerian dub, and Congolese rhumba.

Residents of (or lovers of) Montreal will be particularly delighted by Dominoes, but it’s for all lovers of short fiction and the personal essay, especially those interested in the aural possibilities of short prose forms.

Jody Mason divides her time between Ottawa and Montreal. She teaches in the Department of English at Carleton University and has published short stories in Transverse and Grain.

Author photo courtesy of Jody Mason.

Cover image by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

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My Super Hero

The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop

My Super Hero

by Cynara Li

The story I am about to tell happened in the biggest train station of Beijing, China.

In the middle of the central hall, I was sitting on top of some newspapers that I found beside a garbage can, wiping my tears off. It felt like there were millions of people here. People were yelling, laughing, hugging. I kept my eyes fixed on the two huge entrance doors, so that I would not miss anyone coming through.

The train I was supposed to be on left 30 minutes ago. Despite ditching the cab which was stuck in traffic, running six blocks on foot to make up the time and then begging the staff to let me on the train, I missed it.

This was my first business trip on my very first job. I couldn’t afford any mistakes.

Quickly, I made a plan B. The best and only option I had was to buy a standing ticket on another train. Standing for a 14-hour trip would be rough, but I have no other choice.

I went over to the ticket window, there was a swarm of people gathered around there. Arms and hands were reaching out from every direction. I felt like a little boat taken by a big wave of human bodies. More people were piling up behind me, pushing me forward.

But there was no space forward, only a solid human wall. I was squashed. I couldn’t breathe. There was no air left in my body. I was about to pass out.

“Help!” I cried out. Someone heard me and helped me out.

I didn’t know what to do so I called my family. After I explained everything, my dad gave me a short and firm instruction: “Stay where you are and wait for me.”

Dad’s voice has always been strong and reassuring, with a unique power to calm me down.

I did as he said. I laid down the newspapers I had collected, sat on them and stared at the entrance doors hoping for a miracle.

The door all of a sudden pushed open. It was dark outside but I could see a familiar figure. It was a tall, strong man, wearing a black windbreaker and a black hat. His face was in the shadows, but I knew right away it was my dad.

He paused for a second, eyes locked on me, and walked toward me with a powerful stride. At that very moment, everything turned to slow motion. The loud noise around me seemed very far away. I saw him coming towards me. Step by step, he came closer and closer, like a savior.

He stopped in front me, bent down and reached out his hand to me.

My dad, somehow, happened to be on a business trip on the same day and to the exact same city! And one of his colleagues had cancelled so he had an extra first class ticket! I had my own room, bed, TV and room service! After a good night’s sleep, I arrived at the destination with full energy. I even tagged along with my dad’s welcome party until I had to leave for my work conference. It was like having a 5-star vacation!

My nightmare turned into the sweetest dream.

A few years later, I left my family and came to Canada alone. To survive, I had to grow strong. I became tough. There was no time to cry. There was no one to ask for help.

This story has become my dearest memory, of a time when someone was there, who I could lean on, and who could magically solve everything for me.

Sometimes when I am tired, I wish I could just make a phone call, and my dad would appear from the sky, like he did that night in the train station, like a superhero, and save me.

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A Bouquet of Flowers from God

The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop

A Bouquet of Flowers from God

by Zohreh

I was 21 years old. I was a student in Mechanical Engineering in Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, the capital city of Iran and I was in love.

Yes, I was 21 when I fell in love with my professor.

He studied Electrical Engineering. I was in the math class he lectured named Numerical Analysis.

After almost six months of struggling to get approval from my parents, they were convinced. Or in better words, they gave up.

He had absolutely no flaws. Not with his personality, job, family, appearance, nothing. He wasn’t that tall and he was handsome with black big eyes and black stylish hair. He had a good sense of humor which made him and his classes adorable. He was a skilled teacher, but not strict. He was trustworthy, caring, and kind.

He had served in the war between Iraq and Iran and became ill from the chemical weapons used against Iranian soldiers. He was one of many victims.

I knew that, yet still I couldn’t help myself. There is no cure for love.

I loved him and accepted him with all those things, even though they would hurt us in future. I didn’t want to think about them.

We got engaged. I was walking on clouds with the biggest smile on my face. I had everything I wanted. We were the happiest in the world.

Two weeks after the engagement, he was hospitalized for his illness. I said nothing to my family. I saw no need to cause them worry.

I went to visit him in the hospital on a sunny, hot day in early May. On my way there, I stopped by a flower shop to buy a bouquet of flowers. Even in the dim light of the shop, I could see flowers hanging from the walls and ceiling—beautiful baskets everywhere. I looked around and carefully picked a purple iris and two bunches of white and yellow freesia.

When the shop owner was making the bouquet, I noticed that I didn’t have enough money. I got nervous. I started to sweat. I prepared an apology in my head to say to the man, leave the flowers there.

While I was busy trying to think of the least embarrassing way to say I don’t have enough money, he said, these flowers are expensive, but because these two bunches are the last ones, I will give you a discount.

I let out a small sigh of relief in my head, but I still was worried. I only hoped I had enough.

After a few minutes, he made a beautiful bouquet. I calculated in my head: those two bunches of freesia cost twice the money I had. Plus the iris, I was absolutely sure that it wouldn’t be enough. Oh my God. What should I do now? How could I tell the man that I don’t have enough money with me? I had ordered a bouquet and I had to pay for it anyway.

He handed me the finished bouquet. The purple iris sat in the middle, surrounded by a circle of white freesia and then a circle of yellow, wrapped in a purple paper, with a white ribbon. It was stunning.

After all the frustrating thoughts and nervous sweating, I asked the price.

To my surprise, he told me: 1,500 tomans, the currency of my country of origin, which was exactly how much I had with me then.

I let out a big sigh for real. I paid the money, hugged the bouquet, and left the flower shop happily.

Everybody in the street stared at me and the flowers. It looked like a bouquet for brides.

When I got to the hospital to my spouse’s room, he was sleeping. After a few minutes, he woke up and smiled. I laid a gentle kiss on his forehead. I whispered a piece of a poem we loved— I kissed him and I’m not worried about ending the world anymore. I’ve got my share—and put the bouquet in his hands.

He was surprised and smiled again sweetly. He told me that he was dreaming of a bouquet of flowers which came to him from God.

He looked at the flowers and said: It was this. This is a bouquet of flowers from God.

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The Christmas Goat

The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop

The Christmas Goat

by Scilla Owusu-Amoah

I am nine years old. It’s Christmas time in Accra, Ghana and as kids we all know what that means—Daddy comes alive at Christmas time.

Today he is playing Boney M loudly on the speakers inside and does a little dance, elbows out, swaying from side to side as he makes his way through the kitchen, out the back door and onto the kitchen porch.

“Yaa Tetebea! Fa sekan no bre me!” He calls out to my sister to bring him the knife.

I am crouched down in the right corner of the kitchen porch. I hide my face between my knees and wrap my hands around my head making myself as small as I can.

Maybe if he can’t see me, I won’t be invited to this year’s killing.

It’s 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, the sun is burning hot but the occasional dusty breeze of the harmattan winds cools my body and calms my nerves.

I wonder if Jeffery feels it too?

He stands about 20 feet in front of me, attached by a rope to a tree in the backyard. Jeffery continues to chew lazily at some fresh cassava leaves. He has no idea what befalls it but I do.

This year it’s Jeffery, last year it was Afi the sheep and the year before Kukuwa, the chicken. They all end up the same way, surrounded by jollof rice, fried plantain, fufu and light soup, on the dining table.

On the edge of the porch, my older sister, Abbie, is perched before two large metal basins. In one of them is hot water, where Jeremy, a large rooster, is immersed. He has already met his fate.

My sister is ten, just a year older than me, but at that moment she seems several years older as she stands before the basins, eyebrows furrowed, working painstakingly as she pulls the feathers off the bird. Her oversized orange polo shirt is creased in perfect squares from when it was neatly folded away. The leaf-shaped blood stain in the middle of the shirt is just one of several stains the shirt has gathered over the years. She looks up for a brief second to smile at daddy as he dances past wearing his matching orange shirt with blood stains.

They save the shirts for this special occasion.

I think I have managed to escape being an accomplice to the slaughter of the Christmas goat today!

Uncle DD is digging a hole in the ground to capture the blood from Jeffery.

To the left, daddy tends the wood fire that will be used to burn off the bits of the goat.

I think I should stop calling it Jeffery, now.

I look away as uncle DD unties it from the tree and walks it towards the hole he has made in the ground…It’s time.

My Dad calls me. And that is my cue, I sneak off to the front of the house and find my friends. Outside, I can still smell the firewood and hear the rhythmic pounding of pestles as neighbours far and near prepare their fufu.

My friends and I line up sticks in a row in the middle of the road and stand behind it, “First person to the junction wins. On your marks, get set…Go!”

I sprint from my ready position, confident of my victory before the race even begins.

It’s 5:30pm and the street lights are starting to come on. I sneak back into the house and head to the dining room where my family is starting to gather around the table. I help my grandparents to their seats at the head of the table and hold out the bowl of soapy water for them to wash their hands. I find my seat between my little sisters grabbing their hands as we bow our heads to pray. As I open my eyes, Abbie makes her way into the room with a large saucepan. She sets it on the edge of the table and ladles out light-soup onto my bowl of fufu. I start to eat, shoving morsels of food down my throat when I suddenly realize that the pieces of meat sitting beautifully in my soup is Jeffery the goat, cut up, spiced, and cooked to perfection.

A delicious Christmas meal.

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The Key Story

The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop

The Key Story

by Margit

This is the Key.

I am standing in the front room of our cosy condominium in Budapest.

It is a hot July day. The sharp sunshine is floating into the room from the window in front of me.

I can see the trees of the Gellért Mountain dancing.

I slowly look around. To my left, I see a wall of books on shelves. In the shadowed corner, I see the piano.

Everything in this room has its own story.

How we put together our home, step by step, my husband and I.

I hear my daughter’s happy voice, outside: “We are going on holiday!”

She does not know that we are not coming back.

I should go now, but my legs are frozen.

I make myself remember when they took my husband to the political camp. When he came home after three years of torture, at first he was not able to walk.

This memory gives me the energy I need.

I hurry outside.

I see my daughter and my husband waiting for me.

My daughter has a little backpack, a teddy bear in it, with its head sticking carefully out so it can breathe.

Beside my husband are two suitcases. We have packed just enough summer clothes for ten days.

My husband has the passports, and only as much money as the government will let us take with us for a short vacation.

I stand at the front door, and watch them: my husband, and my daughter.

“Let’s go, Mama!” my daughter says with excitement.

She has no future here. I hear my husband say this in a sad, smiling voice.

Oh yes. I turn back. Finally, I force myself to lock the door.

That was almost forty years ago.

I have this key even now.

It means memory of my life at home and has a very deep, great meaning of freedom.

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